While we have already published two exciting articles today looking at the native ZFS file-system for Linux and also new benchmarks of OpenSolaris / BSD / Linux, here's a third article for the day. We might as well test our new Phoronix serving infrastructure while already having excess load today due to Slashdot, etc (it's good practice for OpenBenchmarking.org), so here are benchmarks of AMD's newest Gallium3D driver compared to their classic open-source Mesa driver and also their proprietary Catalyst driver. Oh yeah, a fourth article is also in the queue for today or the very near future when AMD has a major Linux driver announcement to share.

Is there currently any noob-friendly way to try it out on Ubuntu 10.10 so that compiz also works? As in all pre-made packages and such.

11-22-2010, 04:24 PM

89c51

what is the "bottleneck" that keeps the gallium drivers from performing at the same -or similar- level as the proprietary ones???

is it something in the state trackers or something in the lower parts ??

11-22-2010, 04:26 PM

airlied

Quote:

Originally Posted by 89c51

what is the "bottleneck" that keeps the gallium drivers from performing at the same -or similar- level as the proprietary ones???

is it something in the state trackers or something in the lower parts ??

Its about 100 developers working full time.

Dave.

11-22-2010, 04:27 PM

evolution

Very interesting this review...!

With just a few months of development, ATI R600 Gallium Driver is already faster than R600c driver in most games tested here... Although its 3D perfomance today is still far, far away from what Catalyst can do, it is interesting to know 3D perfomance is improving steadily in Mesa.

Btw, I'll also give a try to R600g when it becomes in a more or less "working" status... even if its 3D perfomance still needs a lot of catch up until have the same performance as Catalyst. (I'm interested in its video decoding acceleration capabilities...)

Cheers

11-22-2010, 04:29 PM

pingufunkybeat

Thanks for the benchmarks. We still have a long way to go, but looking at r300g, there is lots of "win" coming our way.

Still, the numbers are a bit odd.

I get stable 60fps at 1920x1080 in OpenaArena using r600g on a 4550 (!!!), which is at least 3-4 times slower than a 4870. It's impossible that you only get 87fps on a 4870.

11-22-2010, 04:31 PM

pingufunkybeat

EDIT: 54fps, not 87.

It's unlikely that a 4870 is slower than a 4550.

11-22-2010, 04:39 PM

Jecos

Does this include the page flipping/tiling patches?

11-22-2010, 04:42 PM

HokTar

Nice article, thank you!

I can pretty much confirm that it is stable and working nicely. I've been running it for about a month and I only have one issue: the notifications in Ubuntu are not rounded and shaded.
Although I've got to tell you that I pretty much only use Compiz as I don't get hardware acceleration in commercial mesh generation software IcemCFD. That is a big pain and I don't know why is that as it is not supposed to use anything above OpenGL 2.1. Maybe this driver is not recognised as supported or it is blacklisted?

Can't wait to have h264 decoding support!

Dave, Jerome and the others working on this driver are awesome! Thank you so much guys! I hope AMD will switch to this driver soon. The next round of Fusion parts should get Gallium-only support in my opinion.

11-22-2010, 04:45 PM

PsynoKhi0

Those are pretty awesome results given the short time devs have had to work with the code. Bodes well for future card generations.

Given the decent FPS numbers at lower resolutions, IMO it would be interesting to have tests run on netbooks/sub-notebooks. They do tend to ship with lower grade GPUs, though I'm under the impression that extrapolating the performance delta between fglrx/OSS across GPU incarnations is tough (as in OSS drivers not scaling that well yet).

I have the feeling Gallium3D drivers have reached the "good enough" stage for those machines, at least performance-wise.